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Social Media Is Attention Alcohol
Last year, researchers at Instagram published disturbing findings from an internal study on the app’s effect on young women. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the authors wrote in a presentation obtained by The Wall Street Journal. “They often feel ‘addicted’ and know that what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.” This was not a new revelation. For years, Facebook, which owns Instagram, has investigated the app’s effects on its users, and it kept getting the same result.
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Need a Quick Stress-Reliever? Try One of These Surprising Science-Based Strategies.
There is a saying in the Balkans, where I was born and raised, that loosely translates to: “There is nothing worse than finally seeing the light, only to be plunged again into darkness.” As a psychologist, I have observed my patients’ extraordinary levels of stress and anxiety start to ease, only to be replaced by anger, disappointment and despair as coronavirus cases have resurged and the promise of the pandemic’s end has become more elusive. The widespread return to in-person school and the uneven return to offices this fall are further contributing to the sense of being pushed to the limit.
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Making Eye Contact Signals a New Turn in a Conversation
What is found in a good conversation? It is certainly correct to say words—the more engagingly put, the better. But conversation also includes “eyes, smiles, the silences between the words,” as the Swedish author Annika Thor wrote. It is when those elements hum along together that we feel most deeply engaged with, and most connected to, our conversational partner, as if we are in sync with them. Like good conversationalists, neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have taken that idea and carried it to new places.
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Ever Gotten Angry at Your Partner in a Dream and Woken Up Mad? You’re Not Alone.
It was not so much that My Lovely Wife got what’s called an undercut haircut — a style favored by “the youth” that features a partly shaved cranium — or that she dyed the resultant stubble on the right half of her head purple. It’s that she didn’t tell me about it beforehand, leaving me to discover her rather alarming new do at a barbecue we were attending. As hamburgers sizzled on the grill, Ruth tilted her head to the side and the long hair she’d brushed over her undercut fell away, revealing that periwinkle fuzz. That this happened in a dream and not in real life did not lessen the shock.
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Five Ways to Train Your Brain for Another Covid Season
So much for the big post-pandemic reopening we expected this fall. Instead, a season of caution and delay is here: Office-return plans have been postponed. Schools are back in session, but with worries of exposure to the more-contagious Delta variant. Meanwhile, divisions over masks and safety protocols are sharpening, and Covid-19 cases keep climbing. It’s a long way from earlier this summer, when the initial rollout of vaccines promised a return to worry-free social gatherings, travel and other elements of pre-virus life. If you are searching for new ways to steel yourself through this next phase of uncertainty, you’re not alone.
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How to Deal With Stress in Your Life: Embrace It
My Uncle Sidney, a retired U.S. Navy physician and Vietnam veteran, has a military phrase he uses as advice for what to do when life is lousy: Embrace the Suck. He’s dispensed this colorful guidance to me in several stressful situations—when I’ve been anxious on deadline, dealing with a difficult family member, and, most recently, struggling through the pandemic. “The point is, when you’re stuck, surrounded or suffering, you need to assess where you are, learn to live with it, and try to advance,’’ Uncle Sidney says. Pretty good advice for our times. We’re still dealing with the whiplash of uncertainty and the emotions it provokes: frustration, anxiety, anger and fear.
